The Oath

by John Lescroart

  Entering the lounge, he saw at a glance that this new man was older than the others, and harder. His skin was as dark as Rajan's, but he had blue, very weary eyes. A scar began just above his chin, continued through his lips, cut off under the right nostril. Something about the sight of the man frightened him, and Rajan felt himself begin to shake inside. His palms suddenly felt wet and he wiped them on his uniform. The man watched him walk all the way from the doorway to the table where he sat. He didn't blink once.

  Rajan stood before him and tried to smile. He wiped his hands again and extended the right one. "How do you do? You wanted to see me?"

  "Have a seat. I want to ask you a couple of questions about Marjorie Loring. Do you remember her?"

  Marjorie Loring? he thought. Yes, he remembered her, of course. He tried to remember something about each of his patients, although over the years many had vanished into the mists of his memory. But Marjorie Loring had not been so long ago after all. She was still with him. He could picture her face. She was to have been another of the long-suffering dying, as Chatterjee had been.

  But fate had delivered her early.

  28

  After Freeman's lecture, Hardy wasted no time.

  Now he was back at the medical examiner's office where, to his complete astonishment, Strout had his feet up on his desk and was watching the closing minutes of some morning talk show on a small television set. Hardy had seen the TV before, but assumed it was inoperable since it must have been used to kill somebody. Strout indicated he should pull up a chair and enjoy the broadcast. The two hosts—a man and a woman—were talking to someone Hardy didn't recognize, about a movie he'd never heard of. The actor was apparently branching into a new field and had just released a CD. He proceeded to sing the eminently forgettable and overproduced hit song from it. When the segment was over, Strout picked up his remote and switched off the television. "I love that guy," he said.

  "Who? That singer?"

  "No. Regis."

  "Regis?"

  "Diz, please." Strout didn't believe that Hardy didn't recognize the most ubiquitous face in America. "You ever watch that Millionaire show? That's him. You notice the ties I been wearin' this last year? The guy invented a whole line of 'em. My wife tells me I look ten years younger."

  "I knew there was something," Hardy said.

  "And you know why else I love him? You ever notice how happy he is?"

  "Not really, no. I can't say I see too much of Regis myself."

  Strout clucked. "You're missin' out." He sighed, then picked up a stiletto from his desk, pushed the button, and clicked the narrow steel blade out into its place. "Now what brings you back here so soon? And I'm hopin' it's not another request like the last couple."

  "The last couple got you one headline and a quick thousand dollars."

  Strout was cleaning his fingernails with the knife. "Truth of the matter is I been wrastlin' with the idea of givin' you back your money since it turns out you was pretty close to right. That was work worth doin'. After Loring, nobody's gonna call me for doin' the first one—Mr. Lector, I mean."

  "Well, you do what you want, John. If you want to give me back the money, I'd take it. But you won it fair and square. While you're deciding, maybe we could talk a minute about Carla Markham."

  Strout didn't answer right away. Instead, he closed the knife up, clicked it open again. Closed it, clicked it open. "I was kind of wonderin' when you'd want to talk about her."

  "Are you saying there's a reason I should have?"

  "No. I'm not necessarily sayin' anything. I ruled on it clear enough, comin' down on murder/suicide equivocal."

  "But something about it makes you uneasy?"

  Strout nodded. "A lot about it makes me uneasy. You get a copy of my report, is that it?"

  Hardy nodded. He'd read it for the first time on Sunday night, then again at the office yesterday. It had become a habit for him to read and reread witness testimony and reports, where the truth often lay buried beneath mounds of minutiae. "I noticed the gun was fired from below and behind the right ear, going forward."

  "That's correct." Strout closed the stiletto again, then stood up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that lined his left-hand wall. He boosted a haunch onto the thin counter, pulled an old six-shooter off the first shelf, and spun the cylinder. "I've seen it before."

  "How often?"

  Strout spun the cylinder again. "Maybe twice."

  "In your thirty-year career?"

  A nod. "About that. Maybe three times."

  Hardy took that in. "So I take it Mrs. Markham was right-handed?"

  "Nope. That ain't right, either." Except for an unconscious rocking of a leg, the coroner finally went still. "Plus, you know she'd bit the back of her front lower lip."

  "I saw that. Did somebody have a hand over her mouth?"

  "Comin' up behind her, you mean? Possible, but by no means conclusive. Just as likely she bit her lip."

  Hardy sat a moment. He stared without focus in the direction of the venetian blinds behind Strout's desk. Dust motes hung in the striped shafts of sunlight. The cylinder spun a few more times. Eventually, he looked up. "So why'd suicide even get mentioned?"

  "She had GSR"—gunshot residue—"on her right hand. And I know, I know what you're going to say." Strout held up his hand. "Doesn't prove she fired the gun. The shot that killed her could have put her in the gunshot environment. And you're a hundred percent right. But there's the gun by her hand " Strout wound down, met Hardy's eyes. "I didn't have any forensic reason to rule it out, Diz."

  "So somebody might have done a decent job of making it look like a suicide?"

  "That's within the realm of the possible, Diz. It surely is. But let me ask you a question. Why do you want her to be murdered?"

  "I guess because it's the only place left."

  "Except your list, you mean."

  Hardy shook his head. "As Mr. Freeman points out, there's no definite correlation between anybody on that list and who killed Tim Markham. But if Carla was killed, I'm betting it had to be the same person who killed her husband."

  "But wasn't your client the last one at her house before ?" Strout let that hang.

  Hardy sighed. "The theory's not perfect yet, John. I'm working on it.

  * * *

  Armed with their search warrant, Bracco and Fisk approached Donna, the records clerk at Portola. She was about thirty years old, slightly overweight, edgy at first when she found out they were policemen. She wore a small ring in her purple lips and another through her right eyebrow. It was obvious to Fisk that Bracco wasn't going to be comfortable talking to her, so he took point. Somehow, within minutes, they were all friends. She was competent at her job and pulled up and printed out all the Portola personnel and patient records for the relevant days within about a half hour.

  After another half hour in one of the conference rooms, they pretty much had what they thought Glitsky wanted. As it turned out, the ICU nurses did rotate on a fairly regular schedule, although throughout the hospital there were more of them than the two inspectors had first been led to believe. In all, on the ten shifts when Kensing's list implied that patients might have died prematurely, nine nurses had spent some time in the intensive care unit. Only two, however, had been on duty for every death shift—Patricia Daly and Rajan Bhutan.

  "Except we don't know for sure yet that any of those ten were homicides, do we?" Bracco asked. "All we know is Loring and Markham."

  "But we do know Daly wasn't around for Markham, don't we?" Fisk replied. "Although Bhutan was. His partner that shift was—what's her name?"

  She was one of the other seven regular ICU nurses, and Bracco had it at his fingertips. "Connie Rowe."

  "I don't know how you remember a detail like that. I recognize the name when I hear it but I can't pull it up for the life of me."

  "That's all right, Harlen. That's why they put us together. There's stuff you're good at that I'd never think about. Like Donna, for exampl
e, just now. Or looking for Loring's shift, which I had completely blown off."

  Fisk, warmed by the praise, stood up and stretched. "What's another half hour when we're having this much fun?"

  They both walked out to records—by now they were old friends with Donna—and told her there was a last shift they had to check. Bracco the detail man remembered the date: November 12. Marjorie Loring had breathed her last during the swing shift, between 4:00 P.M. and midnight.

  Donna's fingers flew over the keyboard; then she looked up at them. "That's weird," she said. "I think every shift you've looked at, there's been this name R. Bhutan, and it's here, too. Are you guys looking specifically for somebody?"

  "No, but he just keeps turning up, doesn't he?"

  The young woman clicked her black fingernails on the countertop. "What is it about these dates, anyway? Can you tell me?"

  Fisk leaned over and theatrically looked both ways, up and down the length of the room. "We could," he said and added the old chestnut, "but then we'd have to kill you."

  Donna's eyes grew into saucers for a second; then she giggled and punched the key to print a hard copy of the record. Fisk took the sheet and glanced at it. Connie Rowe again, he noticed, not Patricia Daly. With a meaningful glance, he showed it to his partner, then turned back to the clerk. "Let me ask you something, Donna, if I may. Is there any record of the doctors who came and went during these same shifts that we've been looking at?"

  She thought for a moment. "Well, the individual patients would have had their own doctors making rounds. Is that what you mean?"

  "Not exactly. I mean all the doctors who had reason to go into the ICU on those days, for whatever reason."

  "All of them?"

  Fisk shrugged and smiled at her. "I don't know. I'm just asking."

  Her tongue worked at the ring in her lip. "They might keep a record at the nurses' station—you could ask, although I don't know why they would. The doctors come and go all the time, you know. I think it would kind of depend on a lot of things."

  * * *

  To Jack Langtry, the crime scene supervisor, the situation was bizarre.

  Just before lunch, Marlene Ash invited him down to her office to discuss Carla Markham. When he arrived, another guy was standing by her, leaning over her desk, examining the scene photos. Langtry could smell lawyers a mile away, and this guy was one. And then Ash said by way of explanation, "Mr. Hardy's representing Dr. Kensing. Lieutenant Glitsky and Mr. Jackman have agreed to cooperate with him in exchange for his client's testimony. He'd like to ask you a few questions."

  Langtry didn't know what to make of this, but if Marlene Ash was okay with it, then so was he. "Sure, mate," he said. "No worries."

  Hardy's eyes were pinned to the color print of Mrs. Markham's body as it lay when Langtry had first seen her on the kitchen floor. The gun was in the top of the picture. Hardy had his finger on it. "Where'd the gun come from?"

  "Lower-left drawer in Markham's desk, which was in the office next to the kitchen. At least that's where the registration was, the ammunition and cleaning stuff. We got a picture of it somewhere in that stack."

  "I think I've seen it. Twenty-two, right?"

  Langtry lifted his own eyes from the picture, looked in Hardy's face, said nothing.

  "You got it in evidence, right? How many rounds did it hold?"

  "Six, but there were only five spent casings."

  Hardy frowned. "So five shots fired?"

  Langtry shrugged—how the hell did he know? "Four dead people, one dog, one round each."

  "What are you getting at, Diz?"

  Hardy turned to Marlene. "I'm thinking somebody else fired the gun the first five times, then put it in her hand and fired again and took the last casing with him—"

  "Where'd the slug go?" Langtry asked.

  "I don't know. Out the window?"

  "Closed."

  "Maybe it was open the night before. How about the kids?" Hardy asked. He flipped a few photos to where they began; then he looked up and away for a moment and sucked in a breath. Langtry felt the same way, sickened again at the sight of them.

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Just what went down."

  While Langtry spent the next few minutes outlining the specifics of the crime, Hardy flipped through the pile of photographs. When Langtry was done, he had another line of questioning. "How loud's a twenty-two revolver?"

  "Not too. Nothing like a three five seven. Just a flat pop."

  "You shoot one in a house at night, you wake everybody up?"

  "I don't know. Maybe not."

  "All right. Here's another one. Why would Markham have a twenty-two?"

  "I don't know that one, mate. Makes no sense for protection. Wouldn't stop any determined bugger, now, would it? Unless the shot was dead-on. Or point-blank, like these here."

  "Okay." He flipped through some more pictures. "If you don't mind, Sergeant, and Marlene, I'd like to see the house."

  * * *

  They drove out separately. Langtry met him again at the Markhams' front door, and as he was fiddling with the key, suddenly another man was coming across the lawn from next door, waving at them in a friendly manner. "Excuse me," he said. "I saw you waiting, standing on the stoop here. You should know that nobody nobody lives here anymore."

  "Yes, sir, thanks." Langtry had pulled his wallet and badge, and now showed it to the man. "Police. We know all about it. And you are ?"

  "The neighbor from over there. Frank Husic." He motioned toward his own home. "Just keeping an eye out."

  "We appreciate it. Thank you," Langtry said. "We're taking another look."

  "You go ahead then. Sorry to have bothered you."

  "No bother."

  Now they were inside, in the kitchen. Hardy stood on the Mexican tiled floor. Warm daylight suffused the room. Through a skylight, the noon sun drew a large and bright rectangle in front of the stove. There was a double-wide window over the sink, a laundry room off the back, well-lit with natural light. A short hallway by the refrigerator—where the dog had been killed—led to a half-glass back door.

  Langtry was sitting behind him on a dining room chair that he'd pulled over. Hardy went down to one knee. Rising, he crossed to the sink, undid the latch, and lifted the right-hand window. Stepping sideways, he did the same to the left one, then walked back to where Carla had fallen. "If I'm down here near the ground and put a bullet through either of those windows"—he could have been talking to himself—"I don't hit the house next door. I hit the sky. You want to do me another favor? Stand here in the kitchen a minute."

  Langtry did as requested and Hardy went back out through the dining room. His footsteps fell audibly on the central staircase; then his voice carried as he called down, "Count to ten and then call up to me as loud as you can."

  After another minute, Hardy was back in the kitchen. "I heard you, but just barely. I was in Ian's room."

  "Which means what?"

  "It means nobody wakes up while Carla and the dog get shot. It means the dog's shot to shut him up, which is the only thing that makes sense."

  "Then why do the kids get shot?"

  "He's afraid he's woken somebody up. Either that or the kids knew he was here when they went to bed. Except the kids are asleep. The gunshots didn't carry up. But it's still too risky. So it's Ian first, and he silences the gun with the pillow. Then the girls. How's that sound?"

  * * *

  Hardy wasn't going to talk to a witness with a cop there. He followed Langtry for a few blocks, then honked a goodbye and drove back to Markham's street, where he pulled up, parked, got back out of his car, and knocked on Frank Husic's door. The gentleman probably assumed, since he'd been next door with Langtry and his badge, that he, too, was a cop. Hardy let him think so.

  Husic invited him in and offered him iced tea, which he accepted. They then went out the back door onto a well-constructed redwood deck. Hardy didn't know when he'd last sat amidst such an explosion of well-tended fl
owers. Husic had planted them around the deck on the ground, in pots on the deck itself and now in late April they were blooming in profusion. But he'd left an open area in the center of the deck, and in that had placed a wrought-iron table, shaded by a large canvas umbrella. Here they sat in comfortable padded chairs.

  From the transcripts he'd read, Hardy knew that Husic was a retired dentist, sixty-two years old. He had a ruddy complexion and cropped gray hair. Today he wore faded navy blue slacks, loafers with no socks, a shirt with a button-down collar, two buttons open at the neck. He came across as solicitous, friendly, intelligent. Hardy made a mental note that, should it come to that, Husic would make a terrific witness.